>>> Toronto After Dark Film Festival

TORONTO AFTER DARK FILM FESTIVAL from Thursday (October 15) to October 23 at the Scotiabank Theatre (259 Richmond West). Schedule and tickets at torontoafterdark.com. Rating: NNNN

Kicking off another round of splatter and shivers this week, the 10th edition of the Toronto After Dark Film Festival finds the programmers' commitment to Canadian horror as strong as ever.

Gabriel Carrer's The Demolisher (Sunday, 9:30 pm) is a psychological thriller about an ordinary man (Ry Barrett) who turns vigilante after his police officer wife (Tianna Nori) is paralyzed in the line of duty. Shot in a weirdly emptied-out Toronto, it's an effective addition to the Death Wish urban-warfare genre.

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Trevor Juras's The Interior (Monday, 9:30 pm) is an intriguing if not entirely successful blend of white-collar comedy and wilderness horror, as a young office worker (Patrick McFadden) leaves his life behind for the forests of British Columbia, only to slip into an increasingly nightmarish fugue state.

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I really wanted to like Night Of The Living Deb (Saturday, 7 pm), which stars Strangers With Candy's Maria Thayer as a perky young woman whose awkward one-night stand with a nice guy (Michael Cassidy) is complicated by a zombie outbreak. Thayer's always fun, and writer/director Kyle Rankin made the terrific Infestation a few years back, but the horror and comedy elements don't quite gel this time. You wait for a click that never comes.

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The highlight of the fest is Nina Forever (Wednesday, 7 pm), the debut feature by English filmmakers Chris and Ben Blaine. It's about a young woman named Holly (Abigail Hardingham) whose relationship with damaged Rob (Cian Barry) is impeded by his dead ex (Fiona O'Shaughnessy), who manifests in their bed - nude, bloody and very cranky - every time they have sex.

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I know, I know: plenty of horror movies have employed ghosts as metaphors for emotional baggage, and Clive Barker's Hellraiser built an entire messy subgenre out of it.

But Nina Forever does something new - and it isn't even a horror movie, really. Whatever it is, you're gonna love it.